Rev. William R. Callahan Dies at 78; Dissident Who Challenged Vatican
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: July 9, 2010
The Rev. William R. Callahan, a Roman Catholic priest and self-described “impossible dreamer” whose vociferous and organized opposition to Vatican policies prompted Jesuit officials to expel him from their order, died on Monday in Washington. He was 78.
The Rev. William R. Callahan
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said the Quixote Center, an organization that Father Callahan helped found to press for reforms in the church and society. It is independent of the church and based in Brentwood, Md. He lived there.
Like Cervantes’s fictional character who inspired the center’s name, Father Callahan tilted at windmills and never accomplished his major goals, the biggest of which was ordaining women as priests. But his spirited campaigns made him a thorn in the church’s side for a generation.
“Bill tried to be a prophetic voice in the church, a voice crying in the wilderness,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.
Father Callahan remained a priest after his expulsion from the Jesuit order, the Society of Jesus, in 1991, but the church barred him from acting as one. Known widely as Bill, he still sometimes used the honorifics “Reverend” and “Father.”
He aggravated church officials during the American tour of Pope John Paul II in 1979 by imploring priests to refuse to help the pope in celebrating Mass. Father Callahan’s hope was that more lay women would then have to be enlisted to assist at the services.
When the pope that year insisted that barring women from becoming priests was not a human rights issue, Father Callahan replied, “Perhaps this is not a human rights issue because women are not human or they do not have rights.”
He told The Washington Post in 1989 that he was simply “following the example of Jesus, who was never willing to shut up.”
In 1971, Father Callahan helped found the Center of Concern, an organization devoted to social justice issues. In 1975 he started Priests for Equality, to work for the ordination of women. He started the Quixote Center in 1976 with Dolly Pomerleau, who became a work partner of his for many years. They married days before he died.
The Quixote Center achieved particular prominence in its support of the leftist government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, a stance directly at odds with that of the Reagan administration. It raised more than $100 million in humanitarian aid for the Nicaraguan government.
Other projects included printing religious books in which language it viewed as sexist, racist and homophobic was expunged. Father Callahan himself wrote “Noisy Contemplation: Deep Prayer for Busy People” (1982), which called God a “merry” sort who viewed humans as entertainment.
In 1979, Jesuit leaders rebuked Father Callahan for his defiance of dogma, and by 1989 his Nicaraguan activities and liberal initiatives in the church, including a ministry for gay Catholics, had set off calls for his expulsion from the Jesuit order. He unsuccessfully fought the action, which he claimed was never explained.
Father Callahan remained active at Quixote and continued to preach to informal gatherings of dissident Catholics.
William Reed Callahan was born on Sept. 5, 1931, in Scituate, Mass. His mother was a Unitarian and his father a Catholic. His mother died when he was 6 months old, and he was raised by paternal grandparents as a Catholic, Ms. Pomerleau said.
He attended the Jesuit-run Boston College High School and after graduating joined the New England Province of the Society of Jesuits in 1948. He had hoped to be an agronomist, but the Jesuits asked him to study physics because they needed physics professors in their universities.
Father Callahan earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College and a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1962. While pursuing the degree, he worked for NASA on weather satellites. He then moved to Connecticut to teach physics at Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution. He was ordained as a priest in 1965.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three brothers, Larry, John and Bob; and three sisters, Polly Alonso, Helen Demers and Christine DeVelis.
Father Callahan mourned the waning of optimism among his generation of Catholic reformers as the church hierarchy grew increasingly conservative. In an interview with The Post in 2006, he said he drew inspiration from Don Quixote.
“He dreams, he has visions, but he’s basically a silly old man,” Father Callahan said.
“When people work on social justice issues, they don’t win much and wind up dropping out. To laugh at oneself from the beginning is essential.”
From The New York Times,
Hi Steven,
ReplyDeleteA physicist also being a priest is something that can never be easy for such a person as being torn between a doctrine of faith and another of doubt. However, I do admire such people who on the one hand have the humility to concede all of existence to being the design of a supreme architect and yet be so bold to explore the reasoning behind it. It is a shame that today so many find the two as being so diametrically opposed as to permit only one doctrine being held to, as neither stand to be in true opposition, yet rather both serve in their own way to acknowledge the wonder of what we call reality and what is thought as the root of order that has it to be.
Best,
Phil
The man led an interesting life, I'll say that, Phil.
ReplyDeleteI think it's a generalism that Scientists are Atheists.
Most of of them maybe, but not all. It's the Militant Atheists like David Deutsch and Sean Carroll that continue the public perception of same.
I'm an Agnostic, therefore at least scientifically-thinking. A true Scientist MUST be agnostic, by definition. To argue otherwise is to be illogical.
In my opinion ... as always. :-)
Those like Richard Dawkin would like to lump people like you,and I into a category he calls sexed up atheists as he doesn’t considered the scientific philosophy capable of accommodating spirituality. He proclaimed Einstein as being so described in an attempt to recruit him as an ally. What I find interesting is the most spiritual grouping within academia is among mathematicians while the lowest is among biologists like Dawkin. This speaks to me volumes about understanding the difference potential has when considering possibility and probability. This would have most have what we call reality deemed as an improbable accident while some others an unfathomable miracle. I feel sorry for the first group as it would seem to exclude them from having what the scientist needs most to have then successful and that is in having a sense of wonder which provides the best motivation to discover.
ReplyDelete“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.”
-Albert Einstein
Best,
Phil
Wise words as usual from my favorite Scientific Philosopher.
ReplyDeleteI hear you on the sense of wonder thing, Phil. Unfortunately there are other motivations that stand as roadblocks, such as greed, tenure, title, and recognition, which all translate into one thing: money. Fortunately most scientists are intelligent, so these are like speed bumps toward progress, since "results" are still King.
A big thanks to Albert Einstein for taking those negatives and turning them into positives. It is quite possible to have them all, and Einstein showed us the way.
However, I must say that Einstein's God, who was the God of Spinoza, while not Atheism, was pretty darn close. ;-)
Hi Steven,
ReplyDelete“However, I must say that Einstein's God, who was the God of Spinoza, while not Atheism, was pretty darn close. ;-) “
That’s only if one considers spirituality from the most primitive of perspectives. Einstein in such regard noted the following in relation to such when he wrote in an article for the New York Times in 1930:
”And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.”
Although Einstein recognized this is what most people think to be religious he acknowledged what was his own and some others sense of spirituality when he spoke of it as follows:
”Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. ”
Well I won’t ramble on about this anymore except to say that if you would truly like to know how Einstein thought about spirituality, religion and its relation to science I would recommend you hear it from the man himself/ in these in articles written by him.
Best,
Phil
Naw, you're not rambling, Sir Philip. Carry on! Also, you know what a sucker I am for Einstein quotes. :-)
ReplyDeleteI think Religion and Science should be kept as far apart as possible, Phil. I look at Religion as God's attempt to connect to Man, and Science as Man's attempt to connect with God. We are obviously SO far away from any kind of unification between the two, it would take a miracle for them to be united in our lifetime, or several lifetimes. Or it would take a new Einstein or Gauss.
So, shrug, I don't worry about it. There are plenty of problems that WILL BE SOLVED in our lifetime Phil, and several within the next five years. I choose to focus on those. Am I wrong to do so? Personal preference I guess, heh.
I belong to "The First Church of Steve", Phil. Here's our bible:
THE HOLY BIBLE OF THE FIRST CHURCH OF STEVE
Chapter 1.
Verse 1.
(1) Creation Implies A Creator.
The End.
That's it. Nice and simple, and the one and only thing we can be sure of. The rest is details.
I'd ask you to join, Phil, but our only "dogma" is that Steve, and Steve alone, can be a member. We seek no converts. Less argument that way, and what I say, goes. I win every vote. ;-)
We're congregationalist however, so be sure to start your own branch, should you so desire. We will send you no money, nor will we request any.
In some things, we're all on our own.
Hi Steven,
ReplyDeleteI’m glad that you are not put off by my ramblings and to find you enjoy reading the thoughts of the one I consider among the wisest people of all time. Yes he had his flaws as all mortals do yet he had aspects of intellect and character that I wish would become the norm in our species in the distant future. I think if you were to read the essays I pointed to you will discover that he would have disagreed with you that spirituality and science should be kept apart, as the how and why can never be. I dream of a world where for all what he calls cosmic religious feeling and scientific method are once again indistinguishable as they were in Plato’s time for then only the few.
“By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life. “
-Albert Einstein- Religion and Science- New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930 pp 1-4
Best,
Phil
I think if you were to read the essays I pointed to you will discover that he would have disagreed with you that spirituality and science should be kept apart.
ReplyDeleteMaybe and maybe not, Phil. Perhaps I should qualify my views by stating that YES they should be kept far apart, at least when learning the basics of each. There isn't a whole heck of a lot of Physics in The Doxology of the Mass, nor Theology in Group Representation Theory (except in Peter Woit's house, where GRT is worshiped).
And as I previously stated, we have a long way to go before uniting the two, assuming there even is a unification. The Templeton Foundation is all about that stuff, they actually give out grants for those willing to explore such a thing.
Me? I'm just a student, I'm not close to considering any of that stuff yet, and may never be.
What I DO know is that if Philosophy and Physics are to be re-united (a much more immediate and important re-unification), it behooves the Philosopher to catch up on the Mathematical Physics, not the other way around so much, given that Mathematicians and Physicists are already steeped in Logic.
Hi Steven,
ReplyDeleteI guess we keep talking past one another as I’m more speaking about people’s general philosophical take on life and their place in the world. Those essays of Einstein’s I referred to are essentially addressing this aspect of the human condition in relation to its present state and potential for progress. So as far as it goes I would consider all of as students with the only difference being our sources of study and all I’m saying is I’ve found Einstein to be a good source along with some others.
Best,
Phil
Einstein's good, Phil, but he simply wasn't as intelligent as Carl Friedrich Gauss, who IMO was the most intelligent man of all time.
ReplyDeleteI actually like Einstein's philosophy and humanism, Phil, but it was far from perfect. It sadly reflects Einstein's "misplaced optimism", that we all have the potential for goodness.
But we don't. Well, you and I do Phil, as do 80% of all people.
But 20% of people are the reason we have locks on our cars and houses, Phil, you really can't change those people.
Hi Steven,
ReplyDeleteDo you actually believe that many are innately bent to be the bad apples of society? I would agree there is at times so much evil in the world one would think this is so and yet I think the ratio you have is more an over reaction to what the few can inflict on the many. As for locks on our doors I’ve been long convinced they serve more to give pause and time for reflection to many who may be tempted rather than to thwart the evil for those few will just see such things as a challenge rather than obstacles. The hardest challenge for man as Plato realized is to first have what is good to be recognized and that can only be accomplished by having a need to know.That is knowledge is the ally of good and ignorance that of evil.
” Whereas our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.”
Plato- Allegory of the Cave- The Republic
Best,
Phil
If you wish to know my opinion of "evil", Phil, which as loaded a word as there ever was, let's remember the first civilization's attitude toward same. Since the Mesopotamians invented writing, that's the oldest record we have of the word. They used it, and what they meant by it was disease and sickness. Their next-door neighbors, the Ancient Persians, would promote the concept of Satan and flesh the concept out more fully.
ReplyDeleteOf the 20-percent of people that are "not nice", I would guesstimate that only 20% of THEM (for a total population percentage of 4%) are "evil", and for that for many reasons. Mental illness, bad upbringing, a bad choice of friends, or ... what the heck, at least the possibility of supernatural infernal mediation. I don't know, but I do know nobody else knows for sure, either.
If you wish to know my opinion of "evil", Phil, which is as loaded a word as there ever was, let's harken back to Humanity's first civilization's attitude toward same. Since the Mesopotamians invented writing, that's the oldest record we have of the word. They used it, and what they meant by it was disease and sickness. Their next-door neighbors, the Ancient Persians, would promote the concept of Satan and flesh the concept out more fully.
ReplyDeleteOf the 20-percent of people that are "not nice", I would guesstimate that only 20% of THEM (for a total population percentage of 4%) are "evil", and for that for many reasons. Mental illness, bad upbringing, a bad choice of friends, or ... what the heck, at least the possibility of supernatural infernal mediation. I don't know, but I do know nobody else knows for sure, either.